Supercharge Your Help Desk
Customers have multiple channels to choose from when communicating with a company. How a business decides to use their help desk to complement these options is crucial. It’s a business’s responsibly to cater to all of those channels. Also, it needs to be done without sacrificing speed or quality. It needs to be done without impacting the customer experience. In fact, it should boost the quality of the customer experience. How do you accomplish this feat? Integration is the simple answer. Email and chat services are fast and easy. The problem is, good phone service is still in high demand. According to a recent American Express global customer service study, 48% of customers preferred live phone service.
That’s a heavy statistic. And it’s not going away anytime soon.
Here’s Why
Unfortunately, businesses can’t operate with pure efficiency. Despite advances in information flow, people still want a human connection. When customers need immediate help, they want a knowledgeable customer service agent to guide them. That means that the agent needs access to all of the customer’s relevant information. It means they can get what they need to help the customer quickly. Furthermore, they need to find that information without transferring or placing the customer on hold.
This presents an obvious problem for the business. The convenience of non-phone channels make them logical choices. However, ignoring the clear demand for phone interaction is a recipe for disaster. A customer who wants to talk to a real person will feel dismissed if:
- They can’t reach a real person
- It takes too long to do so
What follows the above is a loss of trust. There is a solution to these common causes of poor customer service. As an added bonus, the solution increases the productivity of your entire CRM practice.
Help Desk Integration
Merging phone service with your larger CRM practice gives the customer options. It also gives your agents more options. Plus, VoIP services limit the costs of traditional stand-alone phone solutions. With integration comes organization, which means reduced risk of losing customer data. Every call or email is easily accessible. This information will be visible to management at a moment’s notice. Moreover, it will all be in one place.
It is important to avoid making the customer feel like a number. This can be difficult in the best cases. Still, it becomes even more difficult with multiple, disconnected systems. Allowing customers to use their preferred channel while also delivering effective service is the goal.
Below are a few things to consider
Multiple tickets
A customer with a long query history has likely used various channels. As a result, the customer’s tickets for each channel are spread throughout different systems. This makes a poor customer service experience inevitable. With a localized ticket system, agents can find all of the information instantly. This cuts out the need for manually redirecting calls, and saves vital time.
Priority level
Tickets in one system can be sorted by priority. This ensures that customer concerns are answered in the best order. Furthermore, it decreases the odds of a customer having a poor experience. With a customer’s information scattered, prioritizing will be next to impossible. Worse, customer queues will build up quickly. What follows are increased wait times. That’s a formula for dissatisfied customers. Therefore, instead of forcing the agent to switch between systems, allow them access to everything through one portal.
Reducing human error
In customer service, eliminating human error is impossible. Whenever an email is forwarded or a call re-routed, the chance for error increases. It also increases whenever information has to be translated to another agent. Cut down on this need, and you cut down on error. Promote collaboration, rather than confusion, between departments. Agents should have a single go-to place to find customer subscriptions, order history and account information. In addition, they should be able to seamlessly switch between phone and email to deliver the best customer service experience possible.
See the pattern here?
The customer shouldn’t be doing the work. The quality of their experience should not be dependent on their chosen channel. By integrating phone service with your help desk, both your operational efficiency and customer satisfaction rise. Through integration, agents are able to tailor their responses to a specific customer. Finally, this efficiency is still achieved while satisfying those customers who demand live interaction.
